Dinah Bear

Dinah Bear is General Counsel of the Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) in the Executive Office of the President.  Ms. Bear joined CEQ as Deputy General Counsel in 1981, and was appointed General Counsel in 1983, serving in that capacity through September 1993 and resuming that position in January of 1995.  She has chaired the Standing Committee on Environmental Law of the American Bar Association and the Steering Committee of the Environment, Energy and Natural Resources Division of the District of Columbia Bar.  She has received the Distinguished Service Award from the Sierra Club and the Chairman’s Award from the Natural Resources Council of America.

Ms. Bear graduated from McGeorge School of Law in 1977 and received a Bachelors of Journalism degree from the University of Missouri at Columbia in 1974.  She has been admitted to practice by the State Bar of California, the District of Columbia, and the U.S. Supreme Court.

Council for Environmental Quality

Marta Benavides

Reverend Marta Benavides was born and raised in El Salvador, and has worked her entire life to manifest a culture of peace in her country and the world. She is a member of many spiritual and secular processes for durable peace.  She is the international president of Women International League For Peace and Freedom (WILPF) and follows UN and UNESCO processes as part of the Women’s Caucus, Sustainability Caucus, Peace Caucus, and the Values caucus. In 2005 she was nominated as one of the 1000 Peace Women for the Nobel Peace Prize.

In addition to her international work, Marta is dedicated to working in her local community and throughout El Salvador for peace. She fosters peace through teaching people spirituality, ecology, sustainability, and a respect for all life. Marta created the “Ecological House” in her local community as a way to live and teach this peace. The house uses recycled materials, a water purification system using sunlight and recycled bottles, a medicinal herb garden, and low-maintenance butterfly gardens. Marta has taken these concepts to other impoverished communities in her country, helping to spread peace and sustainability.

Marta also participated in the peace processes to stop the armed conflict in El Salvador between 1980–1992. During the peace process she advocated for human right processes that support the people who were hurt by the armed conflict. Marta live in exile for the duration of the armed conflict and the peace process because of threats made on her life. In 1992 Marta was able to return to her home country and has continued to foster peace through teaching people how to respect all life from butterflies to people.

The Pluralism Project

1000 Peace Women

Lonnie Dupre and Eric Larsen

On July 1, 2006, polar explorers Lonnie Dupre and Eric Larsen made history by becoming the first people in the world to travel to the North Pole in summer.  One of the primary objectives of their historical journey was to create awareness of global warming.  Since returning from their voyage, the two explorers have given talks around the country to continue to educate the public about climate change.

During an Arctic career spanning 17 years, Lonnie Dupre has traveled over 13,500 miles throughout the high Arctic regions of northeastern Russia, Lapland, Alaska, Canada and Greenland. He has led five major Arctic expeditions and participated in six.

In 1992, Dupre led a 3,059-mile, 185-day trek across the Canadian Arctic, the first west-to-east crossing of the Northwest Passage via dog sled and ski. In 2001, Dupre and Australian teammate John Hoelscher completed the first circumnavigation of Greenland—a 6500-mile journey using dog sleds in winter and kayaks in summer.

Eric Larsen has spent his entire life in pursuit of wilderness. A dog musher, white water canoe guide, backcountry ranger, competitive cyclist and educator, he has adventured throughout northern Minnesota, the American West, Alaska and the Canadian Arctic. With training as both an educator and biologist, Larsen brings a unique blend of experience to the expedition.

In 2002, Larsen completed a 700-mile dog sled expedition in the Canadian Subarctic that focused on the culture and land of the Oji-Cree people of northern Ontario. While working as education director for NOMADS Adventure & Education, he helped develop a comprehensive web site and integrated K-12 curriculum to support the expedition.

One World Expedition

Mother Jones

Anne Kajir

Attorney Anne Kajir, 32, uncovered evidence that widespread corruption and complicity in the Papua New Guinea government has allowed rampant, illegal logging, which is destroying the largest remaining intact block of tropical forest in the Asia Pacific region.
In 1997, her first year of practice, Kajir successfully defended a precedent-setting appeal in the Supreme Court of Papua New Guinea, which forced the logging industry to pay damages to indigenous land owners. Today, Kajir is the chief executive officer of the Environmental Law Centre in Port Moresby and is the lead attorney in a Supreme Court case aimed at stopping foreign timber companies’ large-scale, illegal deforestation practices, often accompanied by threats of harm to local landholders who dare to challenge them.

Timber historically is a corrupting force in the politics of Papua New Guinea, whose government has long-standing, lucrative relationships with timber interests. Although the country’s constitution guarantees the land rights of traditional communities living in the forest, the reality is far different. Kajir has found evidence of widespread government corruption that has allowed these companies to act as a law unto themselves, ignoring the terms of the government-issued timber permits, and terrorizing the local communities – at gunpoint in some cases – into signing over their land rights.

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s reputation as a resolute defender of the environment stems from a litany of successful legal actions.  Mr. Kennedy was named one of Time magazine's “Heroes for the Planet” for his success helping Riverkeeper lead the fight to restore the Hudson River.  The group's achievement helped spawn more than 150 Waterkeeper organizations across the globe.

Mr. Kennedy serves as Senior Attorney for the Natural Resources Defense Council, Chief Prosecuting Attorney for the Hudson Riverkeeper, and President of Waterkeeper Alliance.  He is also a Clinical Professor and Supervising Attorney at Pace University School of Law’s Environmental Litigation Clinic and is co-host of Ring of Fire on Air America Radio.

He has worked on environmental issues across the Americas and has assisted several indigenous tribes in Latin America and Canada in successfully negotiating treaties protecting traditional homelands.  He is credited with leading the fight to protect New York City's water supply.  The New York City watershed agreement, which he negotiated on behalf of environmentalists and New York City watershed consumers, is regarded as an international model in stakeholder consensus negotiations and sustainable development.

Among Mr. Kennedy's published books are the New York Times’ bestseller, Crimes Against Nature (2004), The Riverkeepers (1997), and his recent children’s book, St. Francis Of Assisi: A Life of Joy.

Mr. Kennedy is a graduate of Harvard University.  He studied at the London School of Economics and received his law degree from the University of Virginia Law School.  Following graduation he attended Pace University School of Law, where he was awarded a Masters Degree in Environmental Law.

Mother Jones Article

River Keepers

Winona LaDuke

A two time U.S. Vice Presidential Candidate, author of five books, and recipient of a wide array of awards, Winona LaDuke lives and works on the White Earth reservation in northern Minnesota and is a parent to five children.  LaDuke serves as Program Director of Honor the Earth, a Native American foundation working primarily on environmental and energy policy issues, and through this work is involved in national renewable energy strategies for the new millennium.  In addition, she serves as Founding Director of White Earth Land Recovery Project, the largest reservation-based nonprofit organization in the state of Minnesota. 

In her community, LaDuke has worked for two decades on the land issues of the White Earth Reservation, including litigation, policy, and creating a land trust.  In 1989, she received the Reebok Human Rights Award, with which in part she began the White Earth Land Recovery Project.  In 1994, Time magazine recognized LaDuke as one of America’s fifty most promising leaders under forty years of age.  She has also been awarded the Thomas Merton Award in 1996, the Ann Bancroft Award, the Global Green Award, and numerous other honors.  Winona and the White Earth Land Recovery Project recently received the prestigious international Slow Food Award for their work with protecting wild rice and local biodiversity.

In both 1996 and 2000 LaDuke ran for Vice-President on the Green Party ticket with Ralph Nader.  A graduate of Harvard and Antioch Universities, she has written extensively on Native American and environmental issues.  Her books include: Last Standing Woman (fiction), All Our Relations (non-fiction), In the Sugarbush (children’s non-fiction), and most recently, Recovering the Sacred.

Mother Jones Article

Special Reports Article

Zyg Plater

Zygmunt Jan Broel Plater, Professor, Boston College Law School. A.B., Princeton University; J.D., Yale University; LL.M., S.J.D., University of Michigan.  Professor Plater is a member of the bar of the District of Columbia and Tennessee, and teaches and writes in the fields of environmental law, property and land use law, and administrative process, with further interests in comparative international law and public interest litigation.

He has taught on seven law faculties; has been a consultant on environmental and land use law issues in Ethiopia, Costa Rica, Colombia, Nepal, and Japan; and has worked on national endangered species legislation and litigation in the USA—most notoriously six years spent litigating the case of the endangered snail darter fish vs. TVA’s Tellico Dam in federal district court, appeals court, and in the Supreme Court.

Professor Plater worked as chair of the State of Alaska’s Oil Spill Commission legal research task force responding to the Exxon-Valdez disaster, has been a legal consultant in many environmental law cases, has authored many law review articles, and is lead author of the widely-adopted environmental law coursebook, Environmentla Law and Policy: Nature, Law, and Society (3d edition 2004 from Aspen Publishing).

In 2000, by vote of Boston College Law School’s graduating senior class, he won the school’s Faculty Excellence Award.  In 2005 he was awarded the 2005 David Brower Lifetime Achievement Award at the 23rd Annual Public Interest Environmental Law Conference in Eugene, Oregon.

University information

Jerome Ringo

Since being elected chair of the board of the National Wildlife Federation in April 2005, Jerome Ringo has been cited as “the most interesting environmental leader in the United States right now,” by The Nation, and among Ebony magazine’s most influential African-Americans in 2006.

“I’m proud that the National Wildlife Federation is meeting the big challenges head on,” Ringo says.  “We’re building a movement to combat global warming that threatens the very survival of wildlife as we know it. We’re connecting kids and families with nature to restore America’s conservation ethic.”

Ringo and his wife Mary volunteered to assist evacuees from New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina hit in August 2005, and then as residents of Lake Charles, Louisiana, became evacuees themselves when Hurricane Rita swept through the Gulf several weeks later.
Those experiences thrust Ringo forward as a national conservation spokesman on an array of issues including global warming’s influence in making hurricanes more intense, reforming national water policies and projects to put the public interest first, and restoring the degraded wetlands of coastal Louisiana and other habitats vital to wildlife.

His leadership on these and other issues, including keeping the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge free of oil development, led to Ringo’s being named president of the Apollo Alliance in December 2005. The Apollo Alliance is a coalition including business, labor, faith and conservation groups, farmers and others united in the effort to forge a new energy future that will both create jobs and reduce America’s dependence on fossil fuels and foreign oil.

Mother Jones Article

Apollo Alliance Article

Vandana Shiva

Dr. Vandana Shiva is trained as a Physicist and did her Ph.D. on the subject “Hidden Variables and Non-locality in Quantum Theory” from the University of Western Ontario in Canada.  She later shifted to inter-disciplinary research in science, technology and environmental policy, which she carried out at the Indian Institute of Science and the Indian Institute of Management in Bangalore, India

In 1982, she founded an independent institute, the Research Foundation for Science, Technology and Ecology in Dehra Dun dedicated to high quality and independent research to address the most significant ecological and social issues of our times, in close partnership with local communities and social movements.  In 1991, she founded Navdanya, a national movement to protect the diversity and integrity of living resources, especially native seed, the promotion of organic farming and fair trade. For last two decades Navdanya has worked with local communities and organizations serving more than 2,00,000 men and women farmers. Navdanya’s efforts have resulted in conservation of more than 2000 rice varieties from all over the country and have established 34 seed banks in 13 states across the country. More than 70,000 farmers are primary members of Navdanya.  In 2001 she started Bija Vidyapeeth, an international college for sustainable living in Doon Valley in collaboration with Schumacher College, U.K.

Dr. Shiva combines the sharp intellectual enquiry with courageous activism. She is equally at ease working with peasants in rural India and teaching in Universities worldwide.

Time Magazine identified Dr. Shiva as an environmental “hero” in 2003 and Asia Week has called her one of the five most powerful communicators of Asia.

Dr. Shiva has contributed in fundamental ways to changing the practice and paradigms of agriculture and food.  Her books, “The Violence of Green Revolution” and “Monocultures of the Mind” have become basic challenges to the dominant paradigm of non-sustainable, reductionist Green Revolution Agriculture.  Through her books Biopiracy, Stolen Harvest, Water Wars, Dr. Shiva has made visible the social, economic and ecological costs of corporate led globalisation. Dr. Shiva chairs the Commission on the Future of Food set up by the Region of Tuscany in Italy. She is a Board Member of the International Forum on Globalisation and a member of the Steering Committee of the Indian People’s Campaign against WTO. She also serves on Government of India Committees on Organic Farming. She is an International Councillor of Slow Food and a founding council member of the World Future Council.

The area of Intellectual Property Rights (IPRs) and Biodiversity is another area where Dr. Shiva has contributed intellectually and through campaigns. Through her leadership and commitments, Dr. Shiva and her team at the Research Foundation for Science, Technology and Ecology successfully challenged the biopiracy of Neem, Basmati and Wheat. Besides her activism, she has also served on expert groups of government on Biodiversity and IPR legislation.

Biotechnology and Genetic Engineering are another dimension of Dr. Shiva’s campaigning internationally.  She has helped movements in Africa, Asia, Latin America, Ireland, Switzerland and Austria with their campaigns against genetic engineering. In 2003, with movements worldwide she launched the global citizens campaign on the WTO GMO dispute between U.S and Europe.

Dr. Shiva’s contributions to gender issues are nationally and internationally recognised.  Her book, “Staying Alive” dramatically shifted the perception of Third World women.  In 1990 she wrote a report for the FAO on Women and Agriculture entitled, “Most Farmers in India are Women”.   She founded the gender unit at the International Centre for Mountain Development (ICIMOD) in Kathmandu and was a founding Board Member of the Women Environment and Development Organisation (WEDO).

She has initiated an international movement of women working of food, agriculture, patents and biotechnology called, Diverse Women for Diversity.  The movement was launched formally in Bratislava, Slovakia on 1-2 May 1998. Diverse Women for Diversity has carried out studies for the National Commission of Women and the Department of Science and Technology.

Dr. Shiva has been a visiting professor and lectured at the Universities of Oslo, Norway, Schumacher College, U.K. Mt. Holyoke college, U.S., York University, Canada, University of Lulea, Sweden, University of Victoria, Canada, and Universite libre de Bruxelles, Belgium.

Among her many awards are the Alternative Nobel Prize (Right Livelihood Award, 1993), Order of the Golden Ark, Global 500 Award of UN and Earth Day International Award.

Background

Wiki page

Sheila Watt-Cloutier

Sheila Watt-Cloutier is the former Chair of the Inuit Circumpolar Council (ICC), the Inuit organization that represents internationally the 155,000 Inuit of Canada, Greenland, Alaska, and Chukotka in the Far East of the Federation of Russia.  Currently residing in Iqaluit, Nunavut, she was born in Kuujjuaq, Nunavik (northern Quebec), and was raised traditionally in her early years before attending school in southern Canada and in Churchill, Manitoba.

Dealing with youth issues holistically is important for Ms. Watt-Cloutier.  She contributed significantly to "Silatunirmut: The Pathway to Wisdom," the 1992 report of the review of educational programming in Nunavik, and she co-wrote, produced and co-directed the acclaimed youth awareness video "Capturing Spirit: The Inuit Journey."

Ms. Watt-Cloutier has been a political spokesperson for Inuit for over a decade.  From 1995 to 1998, she was Corporate Secretary of Makivik Corporation, set-up under the 1975 James Bay and Northern Quebec Land Claims Agreement.  Defending the rights of Inuit has been at the forefront of Ms. Watt-Cloutier’s mandate since her election as President of ICC Canada in 1995 and re‑election in 1998.  Ms. Watt-Cloutier was instrumental as a spokesperson for a coalition of northern Indigenous Peoples in the global negotiations that led to the 2001 Stockholm Convention banning the generation and use of persistent organic pollutants (POPs) that contaminate the arctic food web.  In 2002, Ms. Watt-Cloutier was elected International Chair of ICC, a term she held until July of 2006.

Ms. Watt-Cloutier has received numerous awards for her work including the 2004 Aboriginal Achievement Award for Environment, the United Nations Champion of the Earth Award, the Sophie prize in Norway (following in the footsteps of Nobel Peace prize winner Wangari Maathai), an Honorary Doctorate of Law from the University of Winnipeg, and most recently, the Order of Canada (the highest recognition of achievement awarded by Canada).

Ms. Watt-Cloutier sums up her work by saying:  “I do nothing more than remind the world that the Arctic is not a barren land devoid of life but a rich and majestic land that has supported our resilient culture for millennia. Even though small in number and living far from the corridors of power, it appears that the wisdom of the land strikes a universal chord on a planet where many are searching for sustainability.”

Craig Williams

A cabinetmaker by trade, 58-year-old Craig E. Williams is a decorated Vietnam War veteran who successfully convinced the Pentagon to stop plans to incinerate stockpiles of chemical weapons stored in multiple locations around the United States. Today, 24,000 tons of obsolete chemical weapons agents are stored in the United States.
Williams started his campaign in 1985 after learning that one of nine weapons stockpiles to be burned was at an Army depot in his community. Worried that incineration would put local citizens and their environment at risk, he built a nationwide grassroots coalition — the Chemical Weapons Working Group (CWWG) — to demand safe disposal solutions and openness within the Pentagon’s program.

Today, Williams continues working with CWWG member groups and citizens in Oregon, Utah, Alabama and Arkansas, where incinerators currently are destroying chemical weapons. They use legal challenges, media campaigns, citizen organizing and other means to ensure proper agent monitoring, air quality compliance, protection of workers rights and improved communication with the local communities. The CWWG also plays a critical role in the oversight of weapons disposal at the other stockpile sites where alternative technologies are being deployed, thereby assuring the military’s accountability and a transparent process.